And if you had to go to Russia to do so? When Russia is at war with one of your allies? While they also aren't too happy about that other guy you are friends with that's still getting his theater certified?

It's safe to say right now NASA can't send people to space, they have to ask Roscosmos very very nicely and pay a big fee for the Russians to do it for them. Soyuz capsules aren't an off the shelf product they are a political tool.

I'm wondering when it gets to the point where we try introducing new species again? This time a little more intelligently (neural networks could help with this very soon hopefully). I wonder at what point it would just be better to do a massive eco-transplant just to have an an ecology at all instead of just letting things go until they are dead zones.

Of course there's going to be significant disruption, just not the kind that totally replaces owned vehicles. It's a rather straightforward economic consideration: is the cost savings worth the inconvenience?

I'm starting to get that you don't know what the network effect is or how the internet of things is going to work.

I don't exactly know what the future is going to be like, but anyone that tried to tell me "basically more of the same" definitely doesn't know what he's talking about. I'm sorry but your future is too normal for me to believe in. Not a single disruption in the next twenty years? Yeah not very likely.

In the not too distant future automated delivery will be so easy, cheap, and ubiquitous due to the self driving electric delivery van with flying drone to doorstep system most people will opt to have purchases delivered (from a separate warehouse most likely with an identical item for fungible objects) instead of receiving stock from the store. People of the future will generally travel light.

People of the future will also have a app that makes sure you always have a ride when you need it. It wont be something you think an awful lot about, your personal AI assistant will just reserve you whatever is appropriate and/or readjust your schedule for you. Worrying about transportation the driving part or the planning part is so 20th century.

Lastly people of the future are going to be Millennials and their children and they are much less materialistic than their parents. People said the horse would never be obsolete because it was a status icon. Even if people owned horseless carriages they would get horses too just to be cool or something... Well we know how that worked out, and Millennials already have a bad taste for debt and liabilities. Why own last years coolest thing when you can ride in this weeks newest thing every week for the same price? Kind of a no-brainer if you aren't so attached to the idea of needing to own property as a reflection of your self worth.

So I wouldn't make any long term investments in car dealerships, but YMMV.

Ah, the law, so naive. Proof of violence isn't the only way to execute a contract, proof of work, and proof of sake work too. Lawrence Lessig's Code (is law) lays out some of the basic frameworks to digitizing the law so we can replace lawyers with very small scripts. Blockchains, math, code, science, and cryptography are the tools to make it happen.

What do you call 90% of lawyers out of work due to automation? A good start.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller

Well it's early but we have that better thing now. The law is dead, long live the law.

The value isn't on earth, you first have to believe there will be a market in space. If you have that vision and the means to act on it then near Earth asteroids have value beyond current measure.

It will be more like this ice chunk is fuel for a million trips to Mars in a MCT. That other chunk of rock is worth a fleet of mining ships. That one over there is raw materials for life support for a decade for a million people...

I'm saying the leadership is open to sweeping populist reform and centralized enough to change quickly. It comes down to how corrupt they are if they decide to do so or not, pretty much like everywhere else. I'm just saying they got the posters printed for Communism already and minimum basic income in a post scarcity market is Communism. You can still have capitalism, it's just on top of the automated basic economy.

I've seen China do some clever things, I don't put anything past them.

Blockchain tech works around/solves (depending on your perspective/opinion) the Byzantine Generals' Problem allowing for confirmable communication. Right now different solutions both on and off chain are being worked on, it's seemingly the competitive place to be developing in crypto space right now. Whoever brings the "internet of things" to functional fruition (and the race has become a sprint) will have the solution to problems from near perfect remote security to optimizing self organizing systems like self driving car networks. Proof of work (and possibly new proofs like stake or something else entirely) is going to be a very powerful future tool that's approaching broad usability very quickly.

I thought Mercury could be survived, you just have to stay very close to the terminator. A city sized crawler/miner/fabricator, trailed by an also city sized solar collector/mega collider/anti-matter factory. In the middle is the actual habitats also city sized. The middle section rotates on a 24 whatever hour schedule giving you night view and day view while rotating the hot and cold to provide even more power and minimize need for radiators. Heat is pumped from solar collectors to the mining equipment that's exposed to the freezing temps. Simply speeding up or slowing down and expanding or contracting can maintain the proper temperature gradient.

It would be a mega project of epic proportions but very doable with not too distant tech < 100 years give or take 50.

Sometimes I like to start a USA chant in moderately inappropriate circumstances, like when a foreign AAA baseball player comes up to bat. Not because I'm racist but because I'm the kind of asshole that likes to blow a dog whistle just to annoy my asshole neighbors. It's funny because it's Pavlovian.